The present invention relates generally to integrated circuits. More particularly, the present invention provides a circuit and method for sensing a voltage and/or temperature from an integrated circuit device such as a Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes) integrated circuit device. But it will be recognized that the technique can be used for monitoring other system on chip devices, such as micro-controllers, digital signal processors, microprocessors, networking devices, application specific integrated circuits, and other integrated circuit devices that may desire on-chip temperature and/or voltage sensing capability.
Integrated circuits have proliferated through the years. As feature sizes become smaller, certain types of devices have become larger, leading to temperature related problems. That is, a large networking or processing device consumes a large amount of power, which is often dissipated as thermal energy such as heat. Heat is problematic and is desirably controlled and monitored. Unfortunately, conventional devices often lack suitable thermal sensing devices. That is, conventional temperature sensing devices are non-existent in many integrated circuit devices. At best, conventional sensing devices often use a diode device to monitor current information to extract temperature information from other non-integrated integrated circuit devices. The diode device is configured with an analog to digital convert to transmit the temperature information. The converter is often expensive, large, and difficulty to scale and manufacture in an efficient manner. Other limitations include difficulty in calibration, monitoring, and often require multi-point calibration, which leads to additional costs during the manufacture of the integrated circuit.
From the above, it is seen that techniques for improving temperature sensing and monitoring integrated circuits are highly desirable.